"What I believe, though, is that I love fighting not in spite of my athletic limitations but because of them. Fighting is hard. The defining aspect of combat sports is discovering that you are worse at fighting than you had assumed and that getting better will be a grueling process that will chew you up, physically and mentally, unless you spend a life-altering amount of time on it. Therein lies the appeal."
"If you have not trained to fight in ways that involve live sparring against resisting opponents, you should know that it is the kind of activity you can rearrange everything else around. The demands, which are not just muscular and cardiovascular but also neurochemical, make the early months of training a totalizing experience. Grappling, in particular, means learning to consciously override your instinct to roll over,"
A childhood attraction to a movie prompted sustained training across multiple martial arts, including tae kwon do, kickboxing, wrestling, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Training revealed persistent underperformance against skilled opponents and frequent losing, yet the difficulty became the main draw. The work of improvement is physically and mentally punishing, demanding neurochemical and physiological adaptation and often reorganizing daily life. Live sparring and grappling produce especially totalizing challenges, forcing practitioners to override instinctive reactions and endure sustained discomfort. The appeal arises from confronting one’s limitations and committing to a grinding, identity-altering process of incremental improvement.
Read at The Atlantic
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